had only to go about his life as though nothing had happened.
Nothing? Good Lord, the credit for Titan would now be his. He would be a great man. The load lightened indeed and that night he slept.
* * *
Jim Gorham had faded a bit in twenty-four hours. His yellow hair was stringy and only the light color of his stubble masked the fact that he needed a shave badly.
'We all talked murder,' he said.
H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation tapped one finger against the desktop methodically, and so lightly that it could not be heard. He was a stocky man with a firm face and black hair, a thin, prominent nose made for utility rather than beauty, and a star-shaped scar on one cheek.
'Seriously?' he asked.
'No,' said Gorham, shaking his head violently. 'At least, I didn't think it was serious. The schemes were wild: poisoned sandwich spreads and acid on the helicopter, you know. Still, someone must have taken the matter seriously after all... The madman! For what reason?'
Davenport said, 'From what you've said, I judge because the dead man appropriated other peoples' work.'
'So what,' cried Gorham. 'It was the price he charged for what he did. He held the entire team together.
He was its muscles and guts. Llewes was the one who dealt with Congress and got the grants. He.was the one who got permission to set up projects in space and send men to the Moon or wherever. He talked spaceship lines and industrialists into doing millions of dollars of work for us. He organized Central Organic.'
'Have you realized all this overnight?'
'Not really. I've always known this, but what could I do? I've chickened out of space travel, found excuses to avoid it.
I was a vacuum man, who never even visited the Moon. The truth was, I was afraid, and even more afraid to have the others think I was afraid.' He virtually spat self-contempt.
'And now you want to find someone to punish?' said Davenport. 'You want to make up to the dead
Llewes your crime against the live one?'
'No! Leave psychiatry out of this. I tell you it is murder. It's got to be. You didn't know Llewes. The man was a monomaniac on safety. No explosion could possibly have happened anywhere near him unless it were carefully arranged.'
Davenport shrugged. 'What exploded, Dr. Gorham?' It could have been almost anything. He handled organic compounds of all sorts-benzene, ether, pyridine-all of them inflammable.'
'I studied chemistry once, Dr. Gorham, and none of those liquids is explosive at room temperature as I remember. There has to be some sort of heat, a spark, a flame.' There was fire all right.'
'How did that happen?'
'I can't imagine. There were no burners in the place and no matches. Electrical equipment of all sorts was heavily shielded. Even little ordinary things like clamps were specially manufactured out of beryllium copper or other non-sparking alloys. Llewes didn't smoke and would have fired on the spot anyone who approached within a hundred feet of the room with a lighted cigarette.'
'What was the last thing he handled, then?'
'Hard to tell. The place was a shambles.'
'I suppose it has been straightened out by now, though.'
The chemist said with instant eagerness, 'No, it hasn't. I took care of that. I said we had to investigate the cause of the accident to prove it wasn't neglect. You know, to avoid bad publicity. So the room hasn't been touched.'
Davenport nodded. 'All right. Let's take a look at it.'
In the blackened, disheveled room, Davenport said, 'What's the most dangerous piece of equipment in the place?'
Gorham looked about. The compressed oxygen tanks,' he said, pointing.
Davenport looked at the variously colored cylinders standing against the wall cradled in a binding chain. Some leaned heavily against the chain, tipped by the force of the explosion.
Davenport said, 'How about this one?' He toed a red cylinder which lay flat on the ground in the middle of the room. It was heavy and didn't budge. That one's hydrogen,' said Gorham.
'Hydrogen is explosive, isn't it?' That's right-when heated.'
Davenport said, Then why do you say the compressed oxygen is the most dangerous. Oxygen doesn't explode, does it?'
'No. It doesn't even burn, but it supports combustion, see. Things burn in it.'
'So?'
'Well, look here.' A certain vivacity entered Gorham's voice; he was the scientist explaining something simple to the intelligent layman. 'Sometimes a person might accidentally put some lubricant on the valve before tightening it onto the cylinder, to make a tighter seal, you know. Or he might get